Design and Art Australia Online

Rachel Mullett, painter and mixed media artist, was born in Berry, New South Wales in 1935. A descendant of the Monero and Gunnai peoples, she has spent most of her life in the Gippsland region of southeast Victoria. A self-taught artist, Mullett began to dedicatedly produce and exhibit work in her sixties, however, as a child was taught by her mother to make drawings on swept earth or on scraps of paper using charcoal from the camp fire.
Mullet’s mixed media works are underpinned by a sensitivity to the evocative potential of various materials and a desire to continue the storytelling traditions of her ancestors in visual form. Her approach is characterised by an interweaving of memory, imagination and close observation of human activity and the natural world. Her work tends to revolve around the tasks and past times that have been the foundation of her family life, drawn both from her childhood memories and from her adult experiences of being a mother of eight children, grandmother of eighteen, and great-grandmother of eleven. The gathering of food is often the subject of her works, whether it be bush tucker such as vine fruits and wild cherries of the Far East Gippsland region and the bogong moths of the Alps, or fruit and vegetables collected during the seasonal work that took Mullett and her family to different farms around Gippsland.

The work Corn Cob Dolls , which was shortlisted for the 2007 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, depicts two girls in their school uniforms, seated beneath a great canopy of corn before a rich blue sky. As she writes of the work in the exhibition catalogue:
'Corn picking was seasonal work my family did together. The matured corn cob had beautiful long softy shiny tendrils that looked like hair growing out of the top of the cob. Because of the different colours of the cobs, little girls played with them like dolls.’

The work Bogong Moths on Paperbark, which was awarded the Deadly Art Award of the 2006 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, consists of a large sheet of paperbark upon which Mullet had painted Bogong moths large and small, some partially concealed within the folds of the bark. This work was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. Mullet has participated in a number of exhibitions, including 'Threads in Time’ at the Koorie Heritage Trust (2001), 'Songlines and Dreamings’ at the Bunjilaka Gallery of the Melbourne Museum (2005), and 'Boolooman Quarenook’ at the Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell (2008). Her work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Koorie Heritage Trust. Her daughter Jenny Mullett is also an artist.

Writers:

Fisher, Laura

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011